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TheRealMacabre — French Grammar
Published: 2009-05-15 22:29:09 +0000 UTC; Views: 1716; Favourites: 26; Downloads: 107
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Le vagin? Seriously, vaginas are masculine!?Related content
Comments: 14
The French language is based on misogyny. It's definitely the most pointless language on earth, including all the languages no longer spoken by anyone. How do I know? I'm stupid enough to have studied it for nine years.
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Le vagin, yep. Some words even changed genders through history.
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(thanks for identifying for a me a now-fixed typo)
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Nice! I think you might want to add an "é" to "féminisme" in French, it takes a funny hat too, as long as we're talking typos! (Only the French-speaking folks would notice, but if perfection is your goal, go for it!)
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Thanks! I finally got around to fixing this.
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Hahaha. That's pretty funny.
But Feminisme is masculine because it's a word from another language. They're generally masculine. They're generally only "masculine" or "feminine" based on what's easier to say.
But ignore me, I is a nerd.
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Hmmm... I thought that most words with the -isme and -asme endings were masculine, just as most words with the -ité ending were feminine (for no particularly meaningful reason). Does that mean that the whole pack of -isme words comes from another language? I know that french nouns follow gender trends, though a vast number of exceptions exist (la trompette, la fourchette vs. le squelette; le tableau, le cadeau vs. la peau).
Anyway, I guess my point with this comic was that gender constructions in language are about as arbitrary as gender constructions in real life. It's masculine because it's from another language is certainly often true (though, as you say, only "generally": le frisbee vs. la pizza), but it still only defers the real explanation as to why foreigness is masculine (or perhaps it's only for simplicity's sake, which raises yet more issues).
I really appreciate that you responded to the comic on an intellectual level. It made me think over what I wrote.
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No, I get your comic, and I think it's funny. Noun gender is pretty much arbitrary. There are some words that find gender based on cultural gender construction, but it's usually just what's easier to say. And, as a rule, foreign words accepted into French are masculine by default.
Cool comic, anyway. And I agree that gender constructions are meaningless. People should just do what they're good at, and what they like, and shouldn't be limited by what's accepted for their genders.
The problem with preferring masculine as a default, though, is relevant -- and, of course, there's the ils/elles thing, wherein you can only refer to a group as "elles" if they're all women, and if there's just one man, then it's automatically "ils", making "ils" the preferential form -- much like how English uses "he" as the standard, as in "If the fireman wants to move quickly, he'll slide down his pole". There are ways of dealing with this: the constructions "he or she" and "one", as in "one can", in English, and in French there is "on". These should be used for technical works, but I would allow the retention of the old-fashioned, albeit biased, constructions for artistic works. It just sounds better.
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Yes, the attribution of gender to french nouns is completely random. The culprit ? Latin. 60% of the french vocabulary was based on latin word, which had not two but three genres : masculine, feminine and neutral. It was decided neutral would be abandonned because three genres were too much of a pain in the ***. But the neutral words had to be put in one of the two genres left. The attribution was somewhat... Arbitrary. One could argue that the masculine genre sometimes sometimes serves as a neutral pronoun, but that's pretty sexist.
One thing I would like to argue, however, is that the exemple put in your picture does NOT work. At all. Féminisme is an ideology, and, like all words ending with -isme, is masculine. Its opposite, chauvinisme, is masculine too. Masculinité (it's grammaticaly correct but very weird... The proper word is virilité
Actually most linguists argue that genres in langage had nothing to do with sexual identity when they were created : it was just a way to separate easily types of words and accentuate their differences, as shown above. It also made memorisation easier. Later people had the idea to use genres when using verbs and adjectives, as a way to put more information about the people involved, so one genre was attributed to one particular sex, which earned them their infamous appelations.
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